The speech can be divided into two parts: the part that recognized and cashed in on all the pressure toward economic justice that Occupy created* during the past four months, and the part that didn’t.

The first part you can just write off to the campaign. Come January 20 of next year—which is a Sunday, so the actual public inauguration might be held on Monday the 21st, but that’s Martin Luther King Day, so maybe it’ll be the 22nd—the Fierce Urgency of Those People will either be misplaced by President Obama or murdered, chopped into bite-sized nuggets and eaten by President Romnich and guests at the inaugural dinner.

The defining issue of our time is how to keep [the basic American promise that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement] alive. No challenge is more urgent. No debate is more important. We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules. (Applause.) What’s at stake aren’t Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. And we have to reclaim them.

Let’s remember how we got here. Long before the recession, jobs and manufacturing began leaving our shores. Technology made businesses more efficient, but also made some jobs obsolete. Folks at the top saw their incomes rise like never before, but most hardworking Americans struggled with costs that were growing, paychecks that weren’t, and personal debt that kept piling up.

And then there’s a bunch of other economic populist stuff, and the thing about how he’s created a commission to investigate and prosecute financial piracy, and it will work hand-in-hand with the Justice Department task force that has been charged with shielding financial pirates from investigation and prosecution and sending them off with a slap on the wrist and a cup of sweet tea, and some other things, and if for a moment the president thought any of this stuff would put a crimp in his campaign’s capacity to raise pirated funds from the pirate industry, he wouldn’t say it or do it. High-level campaign operatives were dispatched to strategic locations in Manhattan and various Caribbean isles with DVDs of a more realistic speech, along with gift bags containing bottles of 50-year-old single malt whiskey and bags of dried, salted peasant ears.

So you can write all that shit off. Then there was the Pinky and The Brain stuff about taking over the world. He praised the troops that were sent off to fight the war that he called wrong and stupid at the time but now says “made the United States safer and more respected around the world.” I guess that was inevitable;  it would be challenging to stand up and tell all those soldiers and such that their lives, vaporized limbs and brutalized minds had contributed mightily to the deeply screwed condition in which we find ourselves today, and incidentally killed, displaced, maimed or permanently traumatized almost everyone who lives in Iraq.

And Iran. We can’t forget Iran. The president stopped short of the full John Bolton on Iran, but did his best to convey the impression that contrary to the opinions of intelligence agencies in the US and, incredibly, Israel, and that of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran has a nuclear weapons program and the US will smite the Iranians hip and thigh (old-timey for “nuke the shit out of ‘em”) before we’ll let them get away with building the nuclear weapons that they’re not trying to build.

All props to John Bolton, by the way. Among all the people who imply or insist that Iran is building nuclear weapons and can’t be allowed to succeed, he’s one of the few who advocate what the delusion (or lie) truly demands, which is an all-out attack on Iran to end their ambitions forever. Sanctions? Pfffffft.

And finally, for the best formulation to date, and likely forever, addressing any aspect of the speech, I turn to IOZ:

I seem to recall some generic bellicosity toward Iran and I definitely remember hearing that hoary Albrightism, “the indispensable nation.” I have always enjoyed that phrase. It suggests a single, sad bag of Cheetohs resting lazily between the coil and the glass, refusing to fall into the hopper, and a single, sad, very fat man banging a futile palm against the other side of the vending machine.

2007: 116 instances.

2008: 112 instances.

2009: 54 instances.

2010: 106 instances.

2011: 3,270 instances.

You’ll notice there’s a roughly 3,000% jump in the 2011 period from the previous high. Hey, I wonder what could account for that?

Just for good measure, here’s the result from the three-month period immediately preceding the beginning of the Occupy protests, from June 18 of 2011 to September 18 of 2011: 44 instances.

So I don’t want to hear no shit about the lack of clarity or effectiveness of the Occupy message and protests. If the president is Newton and economic justice is gravity, then Occupy is the dude who walked up behind Newton and slugged him with a branch and shouted “Gravity!” just as the apple fell upon his head.

We have not a single prominent political figure to the left of your average John Birch Society aficionado speaking out against eternal war and our increasingly predatory national security state. People who oppose those sorts of things are desperately parched. The overwhelming number of Obama supporters glide past these issues as though they don’t exist; once Paul is off stage again, you will not hear a whisper of anti-imperial criticism from them aimed at the president. And that is precisely why those outraged liberals want him off stage again, and want any attention or praise paid his rhetoric in the meanwhile to be seen as beyond the pale.

Barack Obama believes the national security state and the American military empire are good and valuable things. He likes them. He uses them enthusiastically. Ron Paul believes all sorts of weird and unsavory shit, but he doesn’t believe that the national security state and the American military empire are good and valuable things. You don’t want Ron Paul siphoning off liberal/left enthusiasm? Then take those issues away from him and make them your own; they are, after all, progressive bread and butter issues. Can’t, though, can you?

(Obama also used his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance lecture to mount a stirring defense of the Bush doctrine of preemptive war, which makes him not only an imperialist and authoritarian but an enormous asshole as well. And doesn’t say a lot for the Nobel selection committee either. But that’s another story.)

That’s not a good thing. For obvious democratic reasons, one wants the military to identify and empathize with the populations whence they spring. Identifying common experiences is one way to do that, and one experience a lot of military personnel have in common with a lot of civilians is that they’re making crap money and the people signing their paychecks don’t seem to care much about them. Another is that if they lose their jobs, they’re in deep trouble almost instantly.

I ran across a couple of items yesterday that suggest an avenue for amplifying the Occupy protests within the U.S. by involving military personnel. One was a comment by my pal Schmutzie over at his place about a plan announced by Senators Carl Levin and John McCain to inflict some serious Bad upon veterans benefits, and the other was the first truly useful Twitter message I’ve received during my limited relationship with the service.

For whatever reason, congressional Republicans particularly but congressional persons in general like to support our troops by screwing them and, more dramatically, our former troops. Veterans benefits have been under steady assault for decades; once someone is mostly out of uniform and no longer heavily armed, their primary utility is as an occasional prop. The AP story Schmutzie found (in his local newspaper, hurray!) details the latest, and most frenzied in recent memory, example.

Republicans and Democrats alike are signaling a willingness — unheard of at the height of two post-Sept. 11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — to make military retirees pay more for coverage. It’s a reflection of Washington’s newfound embrace of fiscal austerity and the Pentagon’s push to cut health care costs that have skyrocketed from $19 billion in 2001 to $53 billion.

The numbers are daunting for a military focused on building and arming an all-volunteer force for war. The Pentagon is providing health care coverage for 3.3 million active duty personnel and their dependents and 5.5 million retirees, eligible dependents and surviving spouses. Retirees outnumber the active duty, 2.3 million to 1.4 million.

Combined with the billions in retirement pay, it’s no surprise that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently said personnel costs have put the Pentagon “on an unsustainable course.”

Possibly there are other expenses that have put the Pentagon on an unsustainable course, as illustrated in the Powerpoint graphic at left excerpted from the country’s Quadrennial Defense Review, but those pale in comparison to the threat posed by the incessant whinging of our veterans. “But I want an education, but I’m sick, but the place where my leg used to be hurts, but I have PTSD, but I need to eat …” Well, wah, wah, wah. Crybabies.

In a rare show of bipartisanship, members of both parties are lining up behind this one. Levin and McCain are the most prominent ones because they’re the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Armed Services Committee, but a lot of others are squeaking about it as well. Sometimes veterans groups and their congressional supporters manage to forestall or minimize the damage done to veterans and their families at particular moments, but with the economy down, recruiting up and the urgency of Iraq behind us, at least for the moment, it’s a relatively safe time for Congress and the administration to be kicking veterans to the curb.

Which brings me to the second item on today’s agenda. A while back I signed on to follow one among the numerous Twitter feeds claiming to represent the hacker collective, Anonymous. I don’t visit Twitter often and when I do it’s usually to find barrages of stuff from a few of the people I follow drowning out the rest. A few hours before I read the story about Congress going Darwin on veterans, though, I happened upon the Anonymous tweet you see to the left.

The link leads to the full-sized version of the photo displayed rightward. It’s the only photo I’ve seen of someone in the military participating in the protests so one can’t draw any conclusions from it, but the uniform and the Guy Fawkes mask—currently a favored symbol of Anonymous supporters—work well together.

Turning the attention of military personnel from their about-to-be-concluded work of occupying Iraq on behalf of sociopaths and profiteers to the more useful work of occupying Wall Street and the other Occupy sites in solidarity with their fellow citizens could dramatically increase the degree to which the protests are taken seriously by policy makers and the larger public.

There is a vast stand of common ground: Among the many stories representing the 99%, few are more expressive of the contempt our rulers feel toward us than the one about the soldier whose family is living off food stamps while he or she is overseas occupying some hapless land and killing the people who live there on behalf of the 1% and the political class who represent it, and who is discarded and scorned by the same classes when his utility is ended. And for women, things are worse: In addition to all the other drawbacks, the risk of sexual assault is much higher than in the civilian population.

That’s on the harshest end, but service members who don’t go overseas struggle with the same issues of pay while they’re in the service and the continual assaults on their benefits once they’re out. As with most workers, they’re valued much more in the abstract—the work ethic of the common man, the sacrifice of the soldier—than in the concrete.

Reach out, organize, occupy. And spike the guns in advance.

After that, we learn … nothing. A Marketplace correspondent turns in a report featuring a few seconds of the protesters chanting something, presents two consultants who oppose the idea and nobody, from the protests or elsewhere, who supports it, and then closes with this:

“The Robin Hood tax has its own website as well as a Facebook page and Twitter account. But despite its populist appeal, few economists think it will happen in the U.S. any time soon.

In New York, I’m Heidi Moore for Marketplace.”

Journalists! As Samuel Clemens may or may not have said, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.”

Well. Not exactly her president. She’s Canadian, although also Floridian. Hot Sun Bakes Canadian Brain. In the end we agreed that when Rick Perry invades Iran in five years after taking office by winning 45% of the popular vote, I will deserve to be drafted and sent off to fight and presumably die in that war because I think Democrats should pursue big projects like universal health care, the cramming of which down American throats led George W. Bush to invade Iraq. Damn you, Harry Truman!

(Too, this means America will lose because if the time comes when I’m 1) drafted and 2) expected to actually fight, that will be the time when our Great Country is dead on its feet.)

This synopsis is much, much closer to how the actual discussion went than it is to a caricature of the actual discussion, although it is several days shorter than the real thing. Along the way I learned how people like me—loud-mouthed unreasoning lefties—cost Democrats the 2010 midterm elections even though though they didn’t. Because they must have! Even though independents who went for Democrats by nearly 20 points in the 2006 midterms went for Republicans by nearly 20 points in the 2010 midterms because, well, Obama. And Democrats. But a 40-point swing in a third of the electorate was not the issue; it was me. Me! Fuck! What was I thinking!

Okay. Well. Canadians, whattayagonnado.

Just kidding. Very nice people. Don’t do well in hot climates, though.

One good thing about Obama, he’s not making up crazy bullshit about Iran the way the Bushies did about Iraq. So the war really will be Rick Perry’s fault. My fault.

Where are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney living these days, anyway? Shouldn’t we be slapping sanctions on those joints for harboring war criminals? Freezing assets? Travel sanctions for top officials? Preventing their sporting franchises from competing with those in other, less benighted locales?

Light up the gated entrance at Preston Hollow with Hellfire missiles for a few nights and pretty soon a group of masked billionaires will be dropping a trussed-up W out in the street under a white flag. There is precedent!

Cheney, though: I think we all know how that will end if his neighbors try to bring him in alive. First one through the door takes a shotgun to the face.

Do the Canadians deserve Obama? Sure: they elected Stephen Harper, so their standards obviously aren’t what they used to be. And evidently most of them went home afterward and never came out to vote again. It’s possible they won’t even notice we sent Obama up there, especially if we time it for Hockey Night in Canada. At least until they start getting notices from Canada Revenue that they have to buy Aetna health insurance or else.

If they don’t notice we sent him we can’t every well demand anyone in return, but Tommy Douglas is deader’n Nixon so who cares anyway? Maybe we can work out a three-way deal to get Lula from Brazil, since he’s a free agent now. Meanwhile, Biden can hold down the fort here with one foot tied behind his mouth.